Changing Face of Education

Nearly anywhere you drive nowadays you can cruise past a public school that’s recently been opened. You can’t miss them, from the High School of Visual and Performing Arts’ erector-set tower looming above the 101 freeway downtown to the six-story concrete-and-glass hulk of the Helen Bernstein High School at Sunset and Wilton to one of those purple or green or yellow or orange buildings that occupy prominent intersections in Pacoima, San Pedro, Huntington Park, and beyond. The schools are not just splashily spray-painted; they’re in-your-face urban. Often two or three stories high, they’re shoved right to the sidewalk, the opposite of the utopian, reassuringly spread-out archetypes of the 1950s and ’60s and the stately, graceful ones of the ’20s and ’30s. The crop of budget-conscious contemporary architecture attempts to fashion metal and glass and stucco into gritty evidence that public investment is paying off in the form of a good public school education. Three decades of neglect preceded the Los Angeles Unified School District’s current building boom. Enrollment climbed while schools declined. Broken windows, locked bathrooms, leaky roofs, shattered furniture, and shuttered libraries weren’t uncommon, nor were overcrowded classrooms. The district pleaded poverty and its critics cried foul, but the reality remained unchanged until 1997, when voters passed the first of nine local and statewide ballot measures to put up billions of dollars to construct new schools and revive old ones. The money is bankrolling the nation’s largest public works project, dubbed “Roy Romer’s Assembly Line” for the former district superintendent who initiated the vast undertaking. By the end of last year, 76 schools and 59 expansions had been completed to accommodate the district’s 900,000 students. By 2013, LAUSD will have spent $20.1 billion to christen 131 schools and 64 additions. These are big numbers.

For that kind of money LAUSD could have built 73 Disney Concert Halls. Not that the LAUSD has created comparable landmarks. Public school districts don’t have unlimited budgets, let alone the latitude of private developers to relentlessly push the boundaries of design—or anything else, for that matter. At LAUSD, architecture has had to fight for its existence and often has lost. The district’s campaign for new campuses has certainly led to its share of lousy results and many more that are, in the words of one prominent architect sitting on the district’s Design Advisory Council, just mediocre. What’s surprising is that in a school district perpetually uncertain of how children learn or what we ought to teach them and plagued by catastrophic budget shortages, a few good-looking schools have emerged.